Expenditure on agricultural research
Overall German public expenditure on agricultural research is expected to continue
increasing, particularly focussing on aspects covered in the bioeconomy 2023 strategy.
However, the downward trend of basic funding for public research institutes, particularly
universities is anticipated to continue.
Thus the importance of third-party funding is
continuously increasing. Still the increase in third-part (EU and federal level) funding is not
expected to be able to compensate the cuts in basic funding. At the federal level, the
increases will mainly concern BMEL budget; in how far this will also apply to BMBF funding
is not clear. In the likely case that BMBF funds for agriculture will also increase this is
probably rather intended to support financing of universities, as the cooperation ban
(between federal and state level) has been eased.
The thematic areas of agricultural research are in demand; however, agricultural sciences
at universities are often not well positioned. This is attributed to the fact that despite the
systemic nature of agricultural sciences scientist still have to satisfy the remuneration
system of sciences. Opposed to that, interdisciplinarity is regarded a positive asset, which
unfortunately does not always fit the institutional and structural framework conditions.
EU Forecast
euf:ba18h:67/nws-01